Computer Tips -Tech Info

Sorry for the vague title, but there are various thoughts floating around at the moment. The first is a big thanks to the support at Westhost for recovering my VPS over the last weekend. I had started an automatic upgrade of wordpress in one of the sites hosted in this vps, it hung… so I ssh’ed in and found the vps was essentially ruined - it managed to wipe out quite a bit. I’m not sure if it was a coincidence or if the wordpress upgrade was really the culprit, but it managed to destroy quite a bit. The support at westhost though had things back up within 24 hours. It wasn’t just a matter of the site and database getting deleted, but files in /etc were gone (mail configuration hostname resolution wasn’t working, scp wasn’t working…. it was trashed in a bad way.)

Anyway, I’ve still been tinkering with the free morse code mp3 ringtones. In particular I’ve been tinkering with the Text to morse code mp3 generator. I’ve been trying to add utf support. The backend generator does interpret morse for utf characters, I’ve managed to get a way to decode the url encoding if they’re placed in the text box, my big challange at the moment is the file name. I have to truncate the filename so that it’s not too long, but most everything I’ve tried to truncate counts bits instead of characters. Some, even if I tell it to count characters will assume that 1 character=1bit and I wind up with some of the utf characters cut short which gives unusual filename results. In the testing version of the script I’ve just decided to sanitize things by replacing an extended character with an x….

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I’ve been struggling off and on with an issue on my Dad’s computer the last month or so. He said that it would occasionally just shut off completely out of the blue. (He also admonished me not to spend much time on it. Unfortunately problems like this are usually the ones that take the most time to solve because they seem random and it’s hard to pin down the cause.) He runs Windows XP primarily (although we have an ubuntu install setup as a dual boot choice.) In the last year the power supply and video card have been replaced for similar behavior. Although it’s been several months since the replacement with little “misbehaving” since. One of the things I did was run a memory test, which came out fine.

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I’ve spent a bit of time over the last week putting some scripting together to build a new website. The site is morseringtones.com and as you might imagine there are morse code mp3 ringtones available there for download. I’ve put together a list of over 9100 names and there are 4 ringtones available for each name. These are played at 4 different speeds in morse code. For the quicker speeds the names are repeated multiple times to make sure you have a better chance to hear them if you’re using them on a cell phone. I’ve put things up to where you can submit ideas for further names if you like. I may be adding prosigns at some point in the near future and at some point may make it possible for people to go ahead and generate custom morse ringtones from a web interface. So if you want a morse code ringtone for your phone step over and take a look.

I’ve also bundled up the whole collection of them for download via lulu.com, more details can be found on the Purchase morse mp3 ringtones colleciton page.

In the future here I may detail some of the scripts that I’ve used to build this site. It’s all built on a linux server ( the generation of 9100 ringtones at 4 different speeds took about 6 hours.) I’m sure the scripts could have been designed differently but was quite proud of putting together the process for making the whole site so that future maintenance is minimal.

Anyway …-.-

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Recently I had the opportunity to work on an Acer Aspire One netbook. It’s rare that I get the chance to work on a linux desktop system for a client. Most of my desktop users that I support run Windows (although I primarily run linux on my machines.) I get to do a fair amount of server level work with linux variants, but this one, being a desktop install, intrigued me.

The issue was that the buttons on the trackpad didn’t work. She also indicated that she had tried a usb mouse and those buttons didn’t work either. As I looked at it, I had already spent some time browsing through bug reports getting ideas on what might be the issue. It behaved exactly as she described and so then the real fun began.

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So, I’ve spent some time recently working with Zarafa. It’s an exchange replacement that has a completely open source version as well as a version with licenses for outlook if you want that level of integration. It’s web interface looks good and is an improvement on Exchange server’s capabilities with a non-IE browser. Anyway it can install on a linux server and integrate with several different MTA’s. Our choice was postfix since that was already installed for the purposes of processing forms on a webserver on the same host. Outgoing mail “just worked”, but postfix needed a bit of configuration to make the incoming mail work.

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First off, you should now that I like to study languages. I have studied Spanish for a good amount of time (and have a site related to learning spanish for beginners). I’ve also studied French and German and a smattering of other languages. In fact, you might even say that my interest in shortwave radio comes from that same fascination with other languages. Anyway, I have a good number of dvds that I’ve used to help in language learning. Since DVD’s support multiple subtitle and language tracks they can be a great way to practice either your (light) reading or listening skills in a language you’re studying. However, up until now I didn’t know of a video file type that supported multiple audio tracks on the pc. I can’t say that I looked too hard, but….

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I guess by now you’ve noticed that I’m not keeping up with the 1 post a week rate that I had for a while there. I’ve been thinking that at this point I’m going to be getting in one a month or so. More if the mood strikes, but from what I’ve been seeing that should be more than enough…. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately experimenting with getting good google rankings for search phrases and thought I would take a moment to give some details…. Maybe I should back up a few steps first though for some background….

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Time Travel has been one of those science fiction themes that has been the MOST captivating. Not just for me, but for millions of people. I think the “what if”s are probably the most intriguing. What if I could get a message to someone… what if I could find out what happened …. Would those things even be possible, ethical? Up until now, it’s been more of an intellectual exercise, but I’ve been doing some reading on the subject and there is a very real possibility that time travel would be physically possible. Of course, physics classes for years have talked about how travel into the future should be possible. Simply travel away from the earth at near light speed and then back at near light speed. You will have only aged slightly while much time will have passed on earth. But, realistically traveling into the future isn’t as enticing as traveling into the past. We’re ALL traveling into the future one day at a time on the slow path. Here’s how one could travel into the past….

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We’ve all been there… 2 minutes to return a call with a “quick” answer. There’s not enough time for a real conversation. You HAVE to start a meeting in 2 minutes. Times like this, making a call can be like a roll of the dice, do they pick up? If they do, how can I tell them gently that there isn’t time for more than just the message I planned to leave? Well, Slydial is your answer to that. If you’re calling a mobile phone in the United States, you dial slydials number first, then the number you’re calling and you are dropped directly to their voicemail box to leave your concise message!

No need to put off those calls until you have more time “in case” they answer!

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Not too long ago I had the opportunity to take a look at synchronizing a Blackberry to Outlook 2000. They said that the phone tech support told them it was a really easy thing to do and if they had an onsite computer technician they could probably click a couple options and have it set up in less than ten minutes.

Well - they were using Blackberry Desktop Manager 4.3 and had Outlook 2000 which is NOT supported under Blackberry Desktop Manager 4.3

!
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